3D-Printed Ice Cream Guarantees the Perfectly Balanced Cone

The MIT students who hacked together a Cuisinart soft-serve machine, a Solidoodle, and a freezer to create this wonderful 3D ice-cream printer have no plans to commercialise it; they just built it as a proof-of-concept. And that's too bad, because if perfected this machine has the potential to engineer a perfect ice-cream cone that's far less likely to topple.

In its current form, the machine's print head extrudes soft-serve ice-cream produced by the Cuisinart that's immediately blasted with liquid nitrogen to solidify it in place. And to ensure whatever's being printed doesn't immediately start to melt, the printing bed is entombed in a sub-zero freezer.

So far the students have only succeeded in printing simple shapes like a star, but the potential to turn a banana split into a true work of art will hopefully inspire them to one day continue the machine's development—or at the least, make it work with Rocky Road. [YouTube via TechCrunch]